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15. Self aware life
| 15.9 |
Is pain the same? or different for self-aware life? |
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| Three hundred years ago, enlightened western thought considered all other non-human life to effectively be merely beats of burden and lesser beings with no commonality to humanity, other than sharing some general organic design principles. | ||
| Two hundred years ago the work of Darwin showed clearly the connection between life and that we are all related in some way to common ancestry and all life on Earth. | ||
| Fifty years ago, the unthinkable was finally accepted that humans are not the only self-aware life form on the planet Earth. That it seems all other complex tri-neural lifeforms dream. | ||
| Twenty years ago, it was finally accepted by some (not all) of the scientific community that certain complex tri-neural lifeforms express and feel emotions including a general sense of self. | ||
| Now the question is do self-aware lifeforms feel pain the same as humans? or is somehow different? | ||
| The question is not as strange or as routine as it sounds. Everyday human beings slaughter and torture other lifeforms (apart from fellow human beings) to the cries and groans of these dying lifeforms. Are these merely reflexes of life that has no soul, or is the pain and fear of a cow being slowly chopped into pieces while still alive every bit as intense and as awful as if that cow were a human? | ||
| For western nations with an insatiable appetite for the consumption of meat, such notions are dangerous to even consider. If children were to ever reflect on the idea that the dead cow or pig or chicken felt pain at death exactly if that child was murdered then none of us would probably want to eat a steak again. But is this merely speculation or is there some basis. | ||
| While it has taken human beings an eternity to come close to awakening to the reality of the world, and the connection between all things, there is nothing to suggest that self aware lifeforms have any less experience of pain than humans. The fear in the eyes of the cow is real. The fear in the dying pig is real. It is just that we choose to pretend that somehow these "lesser" lifeforms experience an inferior set of emotions than we do. | ||
| One day we will grow up some such deliberate self-ignorance. Probably it will be the day when science is able to provide irrefutable proof. | ||
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